Just envisage that a baby is in the arms of an old, disfigured housemaid. The baby is too young to have picked up the prejudices of its elders. So, when it snuggles in that woman’s arms, it’s responding not to labels in its head; labels like white woman, black woman, ugly, pretty, old, young mother, servant, maid; it’s responding to reality. That woman meets the child’s need for love, and that is the reality the child responds to.
This is the environment within which clear thinking can occur. And, to achieve it, one must drop everything one has learnt, and acquire the mind of the child that is innocent of past experiences and programming, which so obscure our way of looking at reality.
We often do not react or respond to the concrete reality of the person or a thing or a situation. We respond to a barrage of prejudices and presuppositions. The Buddha exhorted humans to be free of all preconditions in order to look at things as they are. Human mind must be like a Tabula Rasa, Latin for a clean slate, on which anything can be written and expunged at that very moment. There is no pre- cluttering and preoccupation.